


This must be what friends are like

by cerebel



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Animal Transformation, Bromance, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-30
Updated: 2011-10-30
Packaged: 2017-10-25 02:30:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/270746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cerebel/pseuds/cerebel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agent Coulson captures Loki, who is stuck in the form of a cat. And then he decides to keep him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This must be what friends are like

Thor assured Agent Coulson that such a combination of ‘noble metals’ would be enough to hold a sorcerer of Loki’s stature. Coulson didn’t take him at his word, of course, but amassed enough external information to confirm it, added a few magical enhancements, and then contracted Stark to plate the trap with as many technological tricks as he could think of.

He expected to find a Norse God trapped impotently in a cage.

He did not expect to see a little black cat.

Coulson stares at the cat for a few seconds, the only movement between them the slow swish of the cat’s tail. Its eyes are bold, cool and quiet and shockingly bright green.

Coulson decides, eventually, that this is, in fact, Loki.

Or, if it isn’t, then how a housecat got into a trap set in the inner security section of SHIELD is worth investigating.

“Well,” he says. “Pack it up.”

The cat yowls as the cage is lifted and tucked inside the back of a SHIELD truck. It paces the length and breadth of the little cage, collapsed to smaller than the size of a human being. Guards, after the trip, claim that the cat stayed awake the whole time and never stopped staring at them. Coulson dismisses any remaining doubts he had about this being a far from ordinary cat.

They set the cage down in one of the labs, and Coulson pulls up a chair.

He stares at the cat.

The cat stares back.

Coulson slowly raises a hand. Points a little device at the cat. And spritzes it with water straight in the face.

The cat shrieks and twitches back towards the far side of the cage. It glares balefully, but pads forward and thuds down, curling up on the cage floor.

Coulson takes that as an indication of submission.

He opens a box next to the cage. “Tuna or chicken?” he asks. “I’d offer liver, but I can’t stand the smell, myself.”

The cat indicates tuna. Coulson slides the food through the bars, along with a slim water container. He settles back in his chair.

“I have a proposal for you,” he says. “SHIELD could stick you and your cage down in a little sealed vault in the ground and wait the couple hundred years it takes you to die with no food or water. Or, you could let us stick a collar on you made out of the same material, and you could help us out a little and earn your freedom. What do you think?”

By a month later, most of the SHIELD employees have grown used to the cat. Taken him as a mascot, of sorts. The collar doesn’t let the cat within a few feet of any of the more sensitive equipment, so he winds his way around friendly ankles and mewls until they lift him and pet him and he can see what it is they’re working on.

He spends most of his time around Coulson, scheming ways to disable the water spritzer.

Coulson engages in the battle of wits with calm geniality:

The cat knocks the spritzer over.

Coulson picks it up. Sets it right back where it belongs.

The cat knocks it over and stomps on the sprayer until it’s broken.

Coulson buys a metal one.

The cat wrestles with it until he finds out how to unscrew the top and dump the water out.

Coulson drops the cat in the resulting puddle.

The cat shrieks and climbs claw-first up Coulson’s trousers.

Now that the cat is in easy range, Coulson pulls his other spray bottle out of the drawer and hits the cat with a burst of water full in the face.

Coulson wins that fight.

The cat wins the next one, by sitting in a little ball on top of Coulson’s filing cabinets whining constantly for several days. Coulson gives in and buys him better cat food.

SHIELD deals with threats that are extraordinary: magical, extraterrestrial, radioactively enhanced. When a sorcerer threatens to take half of Denver out in a magical explosion, they pack up and move out.

Coulson finds the cat sitting on top of his briefcase, silent and intent, watching him.

“You can’t leave this facility,” says Coulson.

The cat doesn’t move.

“You know it as well as I do.”

Not a muscle. Even the tail’s twitch has stilled.

“I’m not denying that you can _help._ ”

A low miaow greets that. The cat sits up straighter.

Coulson sighs.

“I’ll ask Stark for a GPS for the collar,” he says. “You know if you try anything...” -- But the cat is already rubbing against his calves, purring.

In the plane, the cat stays perched primly on Coulson’s shoulder, tail dangling behind. To the point where Coulson’s muscle, along the right side of his neck, starts to twitch from strain. Eventually, the cat noses at his ear, steps around to the other shoulder. Coulson wonders if that’s his version of an apology.

When they get there, the building is locked down. None of their agents can find a way in -- until they open a vent just about the size for a housecat.

The cat’s tail swishes innocently.

“You have ten minutes,” Coulson tells him.

The cat’s back out in five. The building opens to find the sorcerer’s allies all dead, the sorcerer himself cowering in a corner, whimpering. The hostages are fine. Two SWAT teams couldn’t have done it that cleanly. Two _SHIELD_ teams couldn’t have done it that cleanly.

The cat delicately hops back into the van, takes to Coulson’s lap, and licks his paws clean of blood. For the first time, Coulson realizes what he’s dealing with. And he realizes how much mercy the little god has shown them already.

He strokes tentatively over his head, the black fur smoothed down, the fluffy bit behind his ears scratched gently. The cat is stiff at first, unaccustomed to the affection, but by the time they’re over Virginia, he’s liquid in Coulson’s hands, purring softly.

After this, the cat takes to shredding important papers he isn’t allowed to read. He expects to be included.

Coulson leaves fake papers spread with a thin layer of glue.

The cat wipes glue-covered claws on Coulson’s chair.

And Coulson breaks out the spray bottle again.

Frankly, Coulson is starting to enjoy it. Half the time, he comes back to his office to find some elaborately rigged prank that he has to defuse before doing anything productive. The challenge keeps him on his toes. And the cat isn’t trying to _hurt_ him. It’s just … sport.

The cat calms, and grows used to his circumstances, and starts to regularly contribute to their operations. Coulson gets him a bottle of ink so he can write with his claws. Later he finds his spare shirt in the office smeared all over in ink prints. Coulson laughs, brings another and hides it better, this time.

Coulson is no expert in cat body language, but he can see the quiet excitement as the green-eyed creature goes to work on a cypher that has boggled human scientists for decades, as he unravels ancient inscriptions and listens as scientists give Coulson lectures on the cutting edge of technological development.

One evening, he leans back, sighing, his computer shutting down for the night. He looks to the cat. The cat drops off of the desk, and pads over to his nightly cage, his posture resigned.

“Come on,” says Coulson, on impulse, moving to his feet. “We’re going home.”

His house is on the edge of the city. The cat follows him inside, glancing around spotless tile floors, empty shelves and carefully matched furniture. He selects a window seat and hops up, staring wistfully outside.

Coulson hesitates.

After a moment: “Okay,” he says, and he goes up to bed.

In the morning, the cat is missing.

With a sigh, he calls Stark. The GPS shows up as a block away, which puzzles him. When he follows it, he sees no sign of the cat, which puzzles him further. Until there’s a yowl from above him and he sees a little black form perched on top of a tree that’s easily the highest in the neighborhood.

He sighs.

“Get _down_ from there.”

The cat makes what Coulson is pretty sure is a scoffing noise.

“You know that collar has a GPS.”

Another quiet yowl, this time.

By the time Coulson goes for his radio, there’s a crowd gathering. “Someone call the fire department,” suggests a neighbor, and Coulson holds up a hand.

“It’s all right,” he says, “everything’s fine. Go back inside.” He radios for someone to bring him a firehose. And the SHIELD agents hook it up to the fire hydrant themselves.

Sopping wet, the cat paws at Coulson’s ankle until he picks him up, then curls against Coulson’s chest and purrs. Coulson sighs, accepting the ruined suit jacket, certain that the cat is laughing at him.

He doesn’t take the cat home again for several weeks.

The next time he does, this time it jumps onto his bed and flops on the pillow. Like a hat. Like some kind of demented sleep-hat for Coulson.

“You can’t sleep anywhere else?” Coulson asks.

The cat purrs.

Coulson falls asleep. When he wakes up, the cat is still there, fast asleep.

It -- it almost makes Coulson feel like...

It almost makes Coulson feel like he has a friend.

“Wake up,” he says, and he serves the cat fresh fish from a sidewalk market.

The next time he comes back to his office, there’s no prank. No trap. When he sits down, the cat hops up onto his lap and goes to sleep. Coulson pets him, idly, as he finishes his paperwork about the latest Stark disaster.

A week later, the SHIELD facility is in shambles, flooded, half because of a hurricane and half because of an attacking force from the freak who caused the hurricane. There are people trapped in a room sealed, and there’s a short in the damn electricity that means the door can’t be opened. Except manually. And whoever opens it manually will drown.

It’s in screaming winds that Coulson kneels in front of the cat and shouts, “Please. Loki! Please, we need you!”

The cat paws at his collar.

Coulson thinks that the cat will never ride on his shoulder again. That he’ll never prod at Coulson’s face until the agent wakes up and feeds him. That he’ll never tip an inkpot onto Coulson’s white shirt.

 _No,_ he thinks, _no_ , but his hands already move, and the collar falls onto the ground and vanishes in a brilliant flicker of flame and ash. The cat bounds away, fading into rain and shadow.

Coulson waits in agony.

Four of the five missing scientists come running out of the facility and into the waiting vans. The last...

“He’s dead,” one of them gasps. “He’s dead, he was bleeding out, he couldn’t make it.”

“Come on, Phil!” shouts an agent. “We have to go!”

Coulson shakes his head, radio held to his lips. He’s not going. He’s not --

The glass front of the building explodes out, a rain of safety glass joining the flood of water and ice. Out steps a huge, black cat, as tall in the shoulder as a human being, with a sodden bundle in its mouth. It pads over, and carefully deposits the bundle -- the injured scientist, the fifth scientist -- in the back of an ambulance rocking from the force of the wind.

Awed, Coulson touches the cat’s shoulder.

“Thank you!” he shouts, over the wind’s shriek.

The panther -- must be a panther -- nuzzles him so hard he falls over. Collapses back to cat form and limps into the ambulance.

In the ambulance, he sees the blood seeping from the cat’s side, but it’s when they’re at the hospital that the cat collapses. He keens sadly, helplessly, his voice broken with pain. And Coulson cradles him, whispering that they’ll be there soon, that everything will be fine, that he’ll be just fine.

The hospital is flooded with victims from the hurricane.

Coulson loses his cool for the second time in his entire professional career. “ _TREAT THE FUCKING CAT!_ ” he yells, at a doctor.

Promptly, the fucking cat is treated.

He takes Loki home, and settles him in a cat bed made out of his usual pillow. He doesn’t come into work for two weeks, and that’s how long Loki stays in a coma before he awakens.

He devours six fish, which Coulson is pretty sure actually masses _more_ than the little cat body, and goes back to sleep.

Coulson leaves windows open. He unlocks the doors. He doesn’t make any move to put the collar back on. Because what’s been done can’t be taken back, and he owes Loki. He owes him big-time.

He tells Loki as much.

Loki listens.

Eventually, Coulson realizes that Loki’s not leaving. He re-arranges the furniture to suit him. He rides with Coulson to the grocery store and announces his approval and disapproval of what he buys. He goes with Coulson on operations and assists scientists in the lab.

He’s _staying_.

Coulson even takes Loki along to their Antarctica facility, where Loki travels inside Coulson’s own parka. When Loki shivers and shakes from cold, it’s Coulson who holds him close and warms him back up.

Coulson imagines that this would be like what having a pet is like, provided that the pet never urinated on the carpet, assisted in the workplace, and knew several thousand years worth of magical and scientific study.

A week after Antarctica, the Avengers visit. (It’s time he stops hiding this from them.) Thor frowns at the familiar shape; Tony curses and makes noises about cat hair (and, in fact, his suit is bristling with it by the time he leaves); Bruce yelps when the cat leaves red claw-marks on his hand; “Here, kitty,” says Steve, friendly, and is rewarded with a lump of soft purring fur in his hands for half an hour.

But, after a time, Loki hops up onto Coulson’s shoulder and looks for all the world as though he was the one supervising the meeting.

On the way out, Thor smiles and scratches the cat behind his ears.

The cat licks the pads of his fingers.

He’s there the next time they visit. And the time after that.


End file.
